Blog Post

Amazon Business Quickly Merges AmazonSupply

AmazonSupply has been merged into the Amazon Business site much faster than many experts had predicted. Originally there was speculation that the newly-combined business operations would be completed at the end of this year but Amazon completed the project in just a few weeks.

The Amazon Business site now boasts that it has “hundreds of millions of products” available for businesses and offers free shipping on orders of $49 or more. In addition, the Amazon Business site offers business pricing on select items, multi-issuer accounts for registered businesses and approval workflows that will offer control over what products each user within a company can purchase. Customers will also have the ability to compare prices on products on a single page as well as noting the site will contain 100 times more product than existed on AmazonSupply.

SpendMatters.com, an excellent on-line procurement site, points out that more than two million sellers will be represented on Amazon Business.

Pierre Mitchell and Jason Busch write, in an article posted on the site, that the large number of sellers is due to the fact that the marketplace features Fulfillment by Amazon (it sells beyond what Amazon has taken title to in its own warehouses even though it may store the merchants’ goods in the warehouse for a fee, which brings additional value to sellers in terms of shipments offers they can make to customer.)

We know several distributors that are taking advantage of this program, some of whom sell their C and D items this way.

The site also makes it easier for buyers to get specific product information and prospective customers can get product information by “Asking an Expert.”

The decision by Amazon concludes speculation from many within the distribution industry as to how committed Amazon was to the business marketplace. There were some who had predicted that Amazon would walk away from AmazonSupply, just as Google did when it dropped its “Google for Business” venture after only several months.